Essence Vibrant Shock Lip Paints | Review & Swatches

I love Essence as a brand and you may have noticed that I review and use quite a few of their products. The Camouflage Concealer is definitely one of my favourites and I have already spoken about my thoughts on that concealer as a dupe for another favourite concealer of mine, the Urban Decay Naked Skin. I think that even though they do have some misses, they also have so many great products that are so affordable! The majority of their makeup comes in at under £5 a pop and a lot of it is such good quality! I also have a Hot or Not featuring quite a few of their products, but I have since tried quite a bit more too, which leads us to this review. Today is going to be more of a play time post where I am going to be trying out the Essence Vibrant Shock Lip Paints. I have four shades including one of the metallic shocks and I wanted to give you my thoughts…

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So I will give you a little bit of background on these little guys. The vibrant shock’s come in 5 shades as do the metallic shock’s from what I can see on the Essence website. They claim to be high coverage with a velvet-matte finish and have a non-sticky texture. You can pick these up for £3.30 each and they have a range of colours from nude/pinks to bright blues and greens. I picked up 4 shades, 3 of which are the regular formula and 1 is a metallic. For some reason I purchased these a good couple of months ago and never really got excited to try them. It was only since I was rooting through my lipsticks that I found them and completely forgot they were there! I didn’t want to do a first impression of just the one shade, so I have swatched and played with all four of them and have some definite pro’s and con’s.

The four shades that I picked up are 01 Voyeur which is a matte pink toned nude, 03 Red Viper which is a deep matte berry red, 04 Mercury which is a metallic pink with a silver reflect and finally 06 Black Widow which is a matte muted teal/blue.

I really enjoy the packaging of these lip paints, the component is a lot smaller than other liquid lipsticks that I own, but I enjoy the square tube with the black cap and writing. By now, if you regularly read my reviews, I enjoy plain packaging as I think it is a bit more sleek looking and I do really enjoy the packaging on these lip paints. I also enjoy how you can see what colour is on the inside which is pretty standard for any liquid lipstick packaging. You get 5ml of product in each lip paint which is pretty good. Just for reference, the Jeffree Star Liquid Lipsticks have 5.4ml of product and they are £16 each.

The wand on these products is long and thin and can hold quite a lot of product. I find I have to wipe of the excess before applying it to my lips as it can be too much, but when it comes to applying them the wand makes it easy to get smooth edges and not make too much of a mess. I will also say that this is not my favourite wand ever, but it does the job!

Now for the product itself! You could probably tell from the swatches above that the consistency is pretty thin, and lacks pigmentation. I did find these to be very sheer and patchy and when I applied them onto the lips this was very noticeable and pretty much all the colours needed to be worked with quite a lot. More so the shades Red Viper and Black Widow were quite streaky and hard to work with but I think because they are darker shades it was more noticeable. The shade Voyeur was also not very pigmented but as it was a lighter colour I found it easier to look opaque. The metallic shade on the other hand was probably the most pigmented out of them and applied the nicest. I also had problems with these drying down. They didn’t dry fully matte and they maintained a tackiness to them throughout the time I wore them. I was hoping that they would dry down, but they didn’t and despite that they still got a little drying after just a couple of hours wear. I did wear the shade Red Viper for a few hours just to show you how it wore, I think I had it on for about 3 hours total and then it completely removed whilst eating my dinner. These lip paints are not the longest wearing product either, and I found that they kept looking even more sheer as the time went on, and that was just from me patting my lips together. The before and after above was after about 1hr 30m of wear, it looked to have sheered out a little and was feeling pretty dry. It had also removed a tiny bit in the centre where I had been drinking but the photo didn’t show that very well.

Overall I don’t really rate these lip products and I have tried much better lip products from Essence. I just find them to be quite sheer, they can apply streaky/patchy and they aren’t the most comfortable to wear. I did however enjoy the shades they had and I really liked the packaging, not to mention the price was right! If I had to pick a favourite I would say that Voyeur is my favourite and is the easiest to work with, so if you are interested in trying these then that is the one I would recommend to you, the metallic was also quite nice and had a really nice metallic finish to it which I enjoyed. I have swatched all of the shades on my lips too so you can see how each one looks against my skin tone.

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I hope you enjoyed this play time/review on the Essence Vibrant Shock Lip Paints. If you have tried these, like always, please let me know your thoughts!

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Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I am a UK based beauty blogger and makeup hoarder. I cover all sorts of beauty goodness from reviews, makeup looks, tips and much more. I hope you enjoy your stay here in my little beauty filled bubble.